EUUG Copenhagen Conference - Technical Programme

[Keld J|rn Simonsen]

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EUUG Copenhagen Conference Technical Programme (provisional)

The technical programme in Copenhagen
features a row of interesting speakers and topics.

Brian Kernighan on troff and awk

First of all, we are pleased to present
the first keynote speaker, Brian W. Kernighan
of AT&T Bell Laboratories research department, who is one of
UNIX' fathers. He was the one to put
UNIX style and philosophy out of Bell Labs by co-authoring the
famous books "The Elements of Programming Style" (with
P.J.Plauger), (also in Pascal) "The C Programming Language"
(with D.M.Ritchie) and "The UNIX Programming Environment"
(with Rob Pike). These are among the most well written books
in computer literature, the C book is also known as the "C Bible".

Brian is also well known for his work on the UNIX tools
troff
and
awk.
Troff is a text formatter, fit for typesetters and
capable of setting complicated mathematical equations
and fine tables in boxes and all. Brian has augmented
troff with facilities for complicated graphics
and he will give a talk on his latest developments here.
He will also speak on his latest works on
awk,
a report generating language, resembling C a lot, making it
quite easy to do complicated things on ordinary textfiles.

Bjarne Stroustrup on C++

The other keynote speaker is Bjarne Stroustrup, also
of AT&T Bell Laboratories research department. Bjarne
has done some interesting work on C, extending the language
to incorporate "Classes". A class is a concept borrowed
from the programming language Simula facilitating modular
programming in a very general and clean way.

Bjarne will tell us how these new facilities are used in his
"incremented" C langage and compiler, the C++. C++ is heavily used at
Bell Labs and is internally known just as "C", the ordinary
C compiler is named "Old C".
Bjarne will also tell us how he used the Class concept to
implement streaming i/o in a clean way.

Standardisation.

There will be almost a day (Thursday) in the technical programme
focussing on standardisation in the UNIX world.
The X/OPEN group of big European
UNIX manufacturers: Olivetti, Siemens, Philips, Bull, ICL
and Nixdorf will present a talk on their work on a definition of
a new standard interface to UNIX like the "System V Interface
Definition" - in cooperation with AT&T and UNIX Europe Ltd (UEL).
It is hoped that this new definition can be ready in
time for the Copenhagen conference.

Also we hope to have UEL give a talk on AT&T's efforts on
standardisation, especially international standardisation, of
concern to many of EUUG's members. And we might have somebody
from /usr/group coming and tell about their standards effort.

Mike Banahan of the Instruction Set, London will present
a talk on the ANSI work on standardisation of C. Mike
is EUUG's representative in this standards committee.

Mike O'Dell will give a talk on the merits
of standardisation in opting for at bigger market share,
that should be an interesting talk.

C. Sexton of Motorola Ireland will give a talk on
European Languages in UNIX, and internationalization is also
the main issue of the afternoon's Bird of a Feather session,
where EUUG will try to establish a standards committee
on International UNIX together with other interested
parties.

It is also hoped that other speakers will comment
on the work on internationalization in their talks.

Networking.

The Wednesday afternoon is set aside for a double session on
networking: remote file systems, mail handler standards, protocols
and related issues. Doug Kingston of CWI, Amsterdam (CWI is also
known to netters as McVax, Doug was formerly employed at Ballistic
Research Laboratories, USA) will give an overview of remote
file systems, and also a glance of the implementation at CWI.

We will have at least on talk on the new ISO mail handler standard
X.400 and the experiences with the University of British Columbia,
Canada implementation of it for UNIX systems.

A Bird of a Feather session is scheduled late Wednesday afternoon
for those interested in EUUG's European UNIX network, eunet.

Languages.

There will be a lot of computer language issues at this conference,
indeed most of the Friday will be devoted to this issue.
Bjarne Stroustrup will speak on his work
on C++, as noted above. There will also be a talk on the language that
inspired Bjarne, namely Simula, by one of the insiders of Simula,
George Philippot of NCR Norway. George is one of the people on the
portable Simula project and will talk on Simula under UNIX.
We also hope to present a talk on another Simula-inspired
language/system, namely Smalltalk from Xerox. Smalltalk
is also a very graphic oriented system, which now runs
on quite some UNIX systems, mostly on Motorolas.

Brian Kernighan will talk on awk
as noted, and there will be at least one talk on yacc, by
Theo de Ridder of Enchede TH, The Nederlands. He will
talk on his work on better error handling in yacc.

So together with the ITS whole-day tutorial on fast
prototyping including awk and other good stuff, or with the
Instruction Set tutorial on yacc and lex, this conference
is a great opportunity to learn the advanced language tools
of UNIX, together with getting an impression of the newest
developments.

Text processing.

The Thursday afternoon is filled with things related
to textprocessing, although at least one has also relations
to standardisation. The keynote speaker, Brian Kernighan, will
speak as noted above on his recent developments in troff.
Chuck Bigelow of Standford AI, USA gives a talk on
digital font editing, which should be a quite entertaining speach.
Sexton will speak on European languages, and David Tilbrook
(famous for sticking together the programme of the latest many
EUUG conferences) will talk on 'cat -v considered harmful'
considered harmful. Those knowing David will know that this is not
a speach to miss.

Kernel

The Wednesday morning is (apart from welcoming and Brian Kernighan's
talk on awk) for issues on the UNIX kernel.
Hans van Someren of ACE in Amsterdam
will give a overview of Virtual Memory implementations including
S5R2 and also some insights on what ACE did to it.

Other issues.

This is what the programme committee have at the moment.
There are still some slots to be filled out, and we are working
hard to get the rest of the wanted speakers to agree.
In fact we have so many other interesting talks on the roof,
that we plan double sessions the Friday morning.
An interesting thing here is of cause the EUUG annual general
assembly, placed in the early morning after the conference dinner.
Also we have something up our sleave for the goodbye session
including prizes for the best performance in various topics
of the exhibitors, to pep up that side of the arrangement.

A complete overview of all the things happening at
the EUUG Copenhagen arrangement is seen in
the 'Conference at a glance'-table.

Copenhagen Tape Distribution, net.sources

Also there will be a great opportunity at the Copenhagen
Conference to obtain a lot of free software. For the
first time on EUUG conferences it is planned
to host a tape copying service, where members of EUUG can
come and exchange software (which is to be put in the
public domain by agreement). Free sources
from the net (net.sources, net.sources.mac, net.sources.games)
will be available, and also
the GNU Emacs, MMDF, hack and the Wang Institute statisics
package will be there, so here is the chance to get it!
The software will only be available on 1/2 inch 1600 fpi
magnetic tape in tar format, and you should bring with you
a 2400' tape. We intend to make the copying so you can have
it with you when you leave. This is for congress participants
only, the tape will be available to other EUUG members via normal
procedures from the EUUG software distribution center at mcvax.

So, hope to see you in Copenhagen!